The last thing Dr. Aris Thorne heard was the cryo-pods on the Odysseus hissing open, one by one. The crew was waking up. But they weren't alone.
The walls began to sweat. Not ice melt—a black, viscous fluid that oozed from the carvings. It pooled at his feet, and in its reflection, Aris saw something standing behind him.
He frowned. "What kind of anomaly?"
Aris tried to run, but his legs moved to a rhythm not his own. He turned his head—against his will—and looked into the fluid. His reflection smiled, even though his face was frozen in horror.
It was the silence that bothered Dr. Aris Thorne the most. Not the dead silence of space, but the synthetic, processed silence inside the Odysseus , broken only by the rhythmic hum of the cryo-pods. dm f0445 de
The planet filled the viewport—a bruised purple marble, cracked with canyons of black ice. As the Odysseus descended, Aris saw them: the Pillars. They rose from the ice like the ribs of a fossilized god, each one carved with a spiral script that predated human language by eons. They weren't built on the planet; they were built into it, as if the rock had grown around them.
It had no form, only a shape that his mind refused to accept. It was the space between stars made flesh. It was the silence before birth. And it spoke, not in words, but in the absence of them. The last thing Dr
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